Thanks for allowing these women to write, Lisa. What really got me was how they described the feeling lesbians have when they see other lesbians, the sense of kinship, the “knowing glance.” I feel like those days are over. So often when I see another butch lesbian I notice she no longer has breasts or I’m told her pronouns are they. I find it so sad. I just want to look away. That connection, at least for me, is gone.
Karen, thats heartbreaking to hear. But I know what you mean. I was a concert recently and turned around to see a young couple. They looked like a young boy and a girl, mid 20's maybe. But I knew, I felt they were lesbians and sure enough I looked at his chest and his shirt was open and there were the crescent moon red marks underneath his nipples.
Certainly not perfect by any matter of means -- a conflation of sex and gender apparently being its biggest failing. But, nonetheless, some important and useful insights into some relevant principles of linguistics.
I go back and forth about pronouns, I want to respect everyones journey, and I also see the verbal corruption that can and has ensued. I am currently rolling through the links you posted and appreciate your passion.
Likewise on the "back and forth" -- some merit in the idea of using pronouns based on correspondence to typical stereotypes, notably in various "dress codes". What seems like crossing the Rubicon and riding roughshod over fundamental principles of logic and biology is when that is clearly part of pandering to the delusion that people can actually change sex.
But thanks for taking a gander at my links. And for the compliment of "passion" -- though that is maybe more a case of Samuel Johnson's, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." 🙂
Not sure yet whether it's a case of hyperbole or understatement to say that the fate of the western world is hanging in balance over how we deal with the transgender issue. Seems to me -- and to more than a few others -- that the rot that it entails is pervasive and pernicious, and the roots of it go rather deep into some profoundly toxic territory. I had written an article for Medium a year ago, and then reposted it to my Substack more recently on "Wikipedia's Lysenkoism" about my being "deplatformed" there for objecting to their article on transwoman and Olympian Laurel Hubbard which claimed that "she" had "transitioned to female":
That claim is the proverbial "thin edge of the wedge", one that is tailor-made to fraudulently open various doors for transwomen, including into women's sports. Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Time to draw line in the sand, to call a spade an effen shovel and let the chips fall where they may. So to speak. 🙂
But that Lysenkoism -- the "deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable" -- is a durable "theme" that more than a few others -- including several other Substackers -- have picked up on or been there before me:
As much as one might "passionately" object to the outright butchery of autistic, dysphoric, and defenseless children -- the medical scandal of the century, a toxic witches' brew of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and "Dr." Mengele -- one might more reasonably argue that part and parcel of that is the far bigger crime of that "distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable".
I see that you read Bari Weiss' Common Sense Substack, but you, or others here, may have missed a fantastic guest post there by biologist Luana Maroja which more broadly addresses the same theme even if not in the same terms:
"An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science
What scientists are able to teach and what research we can pursue are under attack."
Not at all sure how that situation has developed. Although Carl Sagan suggested some 25 years ago that it starts from putting feelings before facts -- the tyranny of the subjective as my Lysenkoism article quotes UK/US lawyer & philosopher Elizabeth Finne on. But we are clearly reaping what we sown in that regard with transgenderism. Rather moot, though maybe the question of the hour -- one which is getting rather late, on how we're going to turn that tide.
Not only is the article excellent, but also so many thoughtful comments! I have been thinking about this article a good bit and have a couple observations to share. First let me note that I write as a 70-something gay woman. (As a side not, for your amusement, I have always rejected the term “lesbian.” It seemed to me, from the get go, that men got prioritized by taking claim to the word gay, and we women got stuck with something that sounds like a dread disease. This is not, BTW, a criticism at all of those who embrace the term. It’s just my idiosyncratic take.)
But now on to why I write. I want folks to bear in mind that not only are “tomboys” and “butch lesbians” in danger of getting swept up in gender ideology, but also young girls who by no means stand out as gender-role non-conforming. As a young girl, I wasn’t good at sports, and I had very special friends who were both boys and girls. I loved my frilly taffeta-skirted party dress, and equally my plaid Bermuda shorts and T-shirts. The one thing I seemed to be clear on was that girls should be the ones to rule the world, and I acted on that premise to the extent I could, even as I entered adolescence and it became increasingly unpopular to do so. So, I wonder, these days, instead of just being seen as weird and running our high school literary magazine--would I have been told I was trans?
Also, on the subject of young girls and women being lured into double mastectomies: there are many out here, like me, who had to have that awful surgery because of breast cancer and chose, for varying reasons, not to put up with either surgical or other prosthetics. It makes me all the more horrified that any young girls and women might be led to think voluntarily disfiguring themselves is the answer to anything.
Anyway, just random thoughts. Great article, and bravas to the writers and to Lisa for inviting this guest post.
Nov 13, 2022Liked by Lisa Selin Davis, Michellep, Reid Newton
Wonderful essay! Brava to Reid and Michelle, two of my FAIR colleagues. I am a FAIR Senior Fellow and Advisory Board member. I am also a trans man who transitioned from "dyke to dude" at age 39 in 2005. I don't deny my femaleness. Nor do I embrace the contemporary ideology put forth by members of the global "trans community" that womanhood and manhood are identities one can feel their way into. I never claim to be male, but I do acknowledge living in the world being perceived as a man. I am grateful to have found a true community in FAIR and generously lend my time and talent for the purpose of spreading FAIR's message of "advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding, and humanity."
I am so grateful for your commitment to FAIR Zander, it's an honor to work alongside you to advance civil liberties and promote a common culture based on fairness, understanding and our humanity.
Absolutely brilliant essay. Let me count the ways that it counts as such, although I expect I’d run out of fingers and toes long before running out of points to endorse with enthusiastic applause. 🙂 Certainly worth subscribing for another month if not a year.
But I think that a quip or two might reasonably summarize most of my responses on that score, both of which relate to your “strong, steadfast women”. And, speaking of whom, the first comes from Canadian suffragette, Nellie McClung, one of Canada’s “Famous Five”:
It does our countries not good at all to seriously deprecate or deny the fact that, as Mao Zedong put it, women hold up half the sky. Even though philosopher Kathleen Stock makes a credible case that far too many communists, feminists, and women put far more weight on that phrase than is really justified – half the sky isn’t all of it:
But the second quip, underwriting the same “strong steadfast women” phrase, comes from either Will Rogers or Lenny Bruce:
"I never met a dyke I didn't like."
Hard not to like a woman who endorses and manifests what is arguably the best in a man – an unqualified commitment to intellectual honesty: “strong, steadfast women”, indeed. Particularly those who buck the trend, who champion the more or less credible view that “normal is just a setting on your dryer” – even if that setting often has a great deal of utility.
However, something of a fly or two in that ointment – despite its undoubted ability to provide some degree of “salvation”, so to speak – turns on your comments about “linguistic chess” and “female-to-male transitions”. A rather depressing aspect of the “debate” over transgenderism and “transitioning” is a veritable dearth of any of that “intellectual honesty” when it comes to rational definitions for the sexes. Too many – including too many so-called philosophers and biologists – are all too quick to define them as amorphous and loosey-goosey spectra or, gawd help us all, merely as matters of “social construction”.
For an example of the former, there’s transwoman Riley Dennis who seems to “think” that membership in the “female” category is only a matter of “best 3 out of 5” of the traits that are typical of adult human females (AKA, “women”), and who thereby “thinks” that her ersatz neo-vagina and bewbs qualifies “her” as both a female and a lesbian:
But the fact of the matter is that – at least by the standard biological definitions endorsed by several reputable biological journals (Theoretical Biology, & Molecular Human Reproduction), and by Oxford Dictionaries – to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
And from that perspective – the more rational and scientifically justified one – transmen, in particular and at least for those over 18, are certainly entitled to repudiate any claims to being members of – at least – the female category, any of their claims to actually having changed sex should be deprecated if not anathematized in no uncertain terms. We are not doing the transgendered any favours at all – nor to the causes of biology and society in general – by pandering to the pathological delusion that humans can actually change sex. As paraphrased by Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg describing the views of transwoman “Helen Highwater”:
“Yet [Highwater] has come to reject the idea that she is truly female or that she ever will be. Though ‘trans women are women’ has become a trans rights rallying cry, Highwater writes, it primes trans women for failure, disappointment, and cognitive dissonance. She calls it a ‘vicious lie.’ ....”
Not sure that society should want to be any part of such “lies”. Good intentions and all that.
So while I have a great deal of sympathy for much of your argument, there is something of “fatal flaw” in it – and in much of feminism itself – in the tendency to make “female” and “woman” into “immutable identities” based on some “mythic essence”. Neither of those terms should be seen as describing any sort of a borg – “I am Woman! Hear me roar!”. (Rah, rah 🙄). For one thing it seriously detracts from or diminishes any claims of actual women (i.e., adult human females) to being autonomous individuals: we are all more than just something we invest in, at least ideally.
But maybe somewhat more importantly, such views are profoundly unscientific, if not egregiously anti-scientific. For instance, a review of “Professing Feminism” – by (women) Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge – noted that what characterizes most “women studies programs” is a “virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment”:
Seems to be some degree of urgent necessity to have an intellectually honest discussion on exactly what it means to be male and female; maybe more importantly to decide on what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in those categories. My more recent kick at that kitty in the context of answering that “age-old question” of “What is a woman?”:
I posted this article on my Facebook page and a good friend and a therapist (she considers herself nonbinary but I have a really hard time thinking of her as anything but a lesbian woman) responded with the following. Just for consideration. We don't agree but she is a truly wonderful person and I hope - over time - to come to some consensus with her.
Her perspective:
I agree we need a more nuanced perspective, but this isn't nuanced or balanced at all.
Anyone genuinely doing this work is not trying to turn tomboys into men. Tomboys aren’t trans. Practitioners know the difference between sexual orientation/sexual preference and gender identity and lots of people struggle with that. If people who were assigned female at birth turn out to be men that’s a lot different from being masculine or having typical male interests.
What happens when tomboys are no longer allowed to exist without the assumption that they have been born into the wrong body or something is inherently wrong with them? Instead of >>looking outwards towards a society that insists that turning ourselves into lifelong medical patients is the solution. We aren’t doing that. Saying that makes it seem like we are. It positions us as though we were.
It's true that there are folks on either side of this divided discussion who say extreme things. She speaks as though both groups were actual groups and had spokespeople for them.
"being told we are doing it wrong; being lesbian is inherently bigoted”
I don’t say things like that—but she positions me as if I do.
There are individuals whose voices get amplified, much like the right and the left have folks who say all sorts of things and people say liberals are this and conservatives are that.
One of the things folks don’t consider is there in no lesbian community anymore. There is a queer community. Because there is a little less homophobia and more openness it has changed the nature of coming out. That won’t change if trans people disappeared. What is true is that youth come out into the queer community not the lesbian community. Lesbians meet on the internet not in bars. Those days are gone.
This is my field. No one is trying to turn butch women or tomboys into trans men. Many of the doctors and therapists are lesbians and gay men. They don’t have an investment in getting rid of LGB folks.
I think many people are just trying to figure out how to be themselves and find space for themselves. When we were younger there wasn't a choice about transness to explore. Now there is and kids need adults to assist them in sorting this out in non triggered sorts of ways. We need to figure out how to make space for everyone to be who they are. We need to stop taking away people's choices-like taking away families rights to access medical care for trans kids.
The articles she cites are are interesting-they are the trans-women-are-men articles despite her talking here about tomboys. And yes its upsetting for those of us who know that trans women are women. That gender exists. And yes, it’s also true when you tell someone they don’t exist or aren’t who they say they are, they will at times act out aggressively. Trans women get tired of being called men—despite their identities, despite how hard they work to be included and seen. Doesn't excuse inappropriate behavior yet people feel provoked and turning the other cheek gets old.
The regret rate, and I am an expert in this—look me up-hell I am in wikipedia under detransition-—is very small. [see below for her article] Smaller than lasik surgery, lower than knee surgery regret, lower than prostate surgery regret—it gets distorted. Adults make medical decisions they regret daily. We don’t stop them from making decisions. Teenagers increasingly get cosmetic surgery and no one is screaming about that and frankly I think perhaps girls getting breast implants is a bigger deal. In 2019 8000 girls 13-18 got breast implants and we know there is breast implant disease -read about Danica Patrick. So what this article is is political across many dimensions. It’s not as simple as tomboys are transitioning to become men because they don’t know about being masculine lesbians. I'd welcome real discussion because this is really complicated and we all get polarized very quickly. It's hard to talk about. How do masculine lesbians reach out and provide support to younger women rather than taking away trans access to health care? How does the queer community heal this division? These are important. FAIR sounds like a reasonable organization but it's actually pretty knee jerk conservative. It's anti affirmative action in a very creepy way.
I'm writing an article about gender therapists and would love to quote her—please have her reach out to me. It's great she doesn't say things like being gay is bigoted, but it doesn't mean that other young people aren't learning that message. As for her assertion that she's an expert on detransition—if that's true, she knows that we truly have no idea what the rate is because we have no long-term data, especially on young people transitioned since the spike went way up in 2015. A recent, short-term study showed 7%, and some people say it can take about 8-10 years to fully realize it was the wrong choice—or the right choice!
Thanks for allowing these women to write, Lisa. What really got me was how they described the feeling lesbians have when they see other lesbians, the sense of kinship, the “knowing glance.” I feel like those days are over. So often when I see another butch lesbian I notice she no longer has breasts or I’m told her pronouns are they. I find it so sad. I just want to look away. That connection, at least for me, is gone.
Karen, thats heartbreaking to hear. But I know what you mean. I was a concert recently and turned around to see a young couple. They looked like a young boy and a girl, mid 20's maybe. But I knew, I felt they were lesbians and sure enough I looked at his chest and his shirt was open and there were the crescent moon red marks underneath his nipples.
"his" - quote, unquote ...
Not sure that the corruption of the principles behind the use of pronouns isn't part and parcel of the problem with transgenderism.
You might have some interest in a book by linguist and Substacker "Lexi-Contrera" on:
"Pesky Pronouns and Compelling Conundrums: The S-He-It Has Hit the Fan"
https://lexicons.substack.com/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BFV3VWHC
Certainly not perfect by any matter of means -- a conflation of sex and gender apparently being its biggest failing. But, nonetheless, some important and useful insights into some relevant principles of linguistics.
I go back and forth about pronouns, I want to respect everyones journey, and I also see the verbal corruption that can and has ensued. I am currently rolling through the links you posted and appreciate your passion.
Likewise on the "back and forth" -- some merit in the idea of using pronouns based on correspondence to typical stereotypes, notably in various "dress codes". What seems like crossing the Rubicon and riding roughshod over fundamental principles of logic and biology is when that is clearly part of pandering to the delusion that people can actually change sex.
But thanks for taking a gander at my links. And for the compliment of "passion" -- though that is maybe more a case of Samuel Johnson's, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." 🙂
Not sure yet whether it's a case of hyperbole or understatement to say that the fate of the western world is hanging in balance over how we deal with the transgender issue. Seems to me -- and to more than a few others -- that the rot that it entails is pervasive and pernicious, and the roots of it go rather deep into some profoundly toxic territory. I had written an article for Medium a year ago, and then reposted it to my Substack more recently on "Wikipedia's Lysenkoism" about my being "deplatformed" there for objecting to their article on transwoman and Olympian Laurel Hubbard which claimed that "she" had "transitioned to female":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/wikipedias-lysenkoism
That claim is the proverbial "thin edge of the wedge", one that is tailor-made to fraudulently open various doors for transwomen, including into women's sports. Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Time to draw line in the sand, to call a spade an effen shovel and let the chips fall where they may. So to speak. 🙂
But that Lysenkoism -- the "deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable" -- is a durable "theme" that more than a few others -- including several other Substackers -- have picked up on or been there before me:
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-greenwashed-heirs-to-lysenko
https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/american-medical-lysenkoism
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/todays-elect-left-is-as-anti-science
As much as one might "passionately" object to the outright butchery of autistic, dysphoric, and defenseless children -- the medical scandal of the century, a toxic witches' brew of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and "Dr." Mengele -- one might more reasonably argue that part and parcel of that is the far bigger crime of that "distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable".
I see that you read Bari Weiss' Common Sense Substack, but you, or others here, may have missed a fantastic guest post there by biologist Luana Maroja which more broadly addresses the same theme even if not in the same terms:
"An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science
What scientists are able to teach and what research we can pursue are under attack."
https://www.commonsense.news/p/an-existential-threat-to-doing-good
Not at all sure how that situation has developed. Although Carl Sagan suggested some 25 years ago that it starts from putting feelings before facts -- the tyranny of the subjective as my Lysenkoism article quotes UK/US lawyer & philosopher Elizabeth Finne on. But we are clearly reaping what we sown in that regard with transgenderism. Rather moot, though maybe the question of the hour -- one which is getting rather late, on how we're going to turn that tide.
Wow. Pulitzer Prize level of writing. Thank you!!!!!!!
Beautifully written and something I could share with confused youth
Not only is the article excellent, but also so many thoughtful comments! I have been thinking about this article a good bit and have a couple observations to share. First let me note that I write as a 70-something gay woman. (As a side not, for your amusement, I have always rejected the term “lesbian.” It seemed to me, from the get go, that men got prioritized by taking claim to the word gay, and we women got stuck with something that sounds like a dread disease. This is not, BTW, a criticism at all of those who embrace the term. It’s just my idiosyncratic take.)
But now on to why I write. I want folks to bear in mind that not only are “tomboys” and “butch lesbians” in danger of getting swept up in gender ideology, but also young girls who by no means stand out as gender-role non-conforming. As a young girl, I wasn’t good at sports, and I had very special friends who were both boys and girls. I loved my frilly taffeta-skirted party dress, and equally my plaid Bermuda shorts and T-shirts. The one thing I seemed to be clear on was that girls should be the ones to rule the world, and I acted on that premise to the extent I could, even as I entered adolescence and it became increasingly unpopular to do so. So, I wonder, these days, instead of just being seen as weird and running our high school literary magazine--would I have been told I was trans?
Also, on the subject of young girls and women being lured into double mastectomies: there are many out here, like me, who had to have that awful surgery because of breast cancer and chose, for varying reasons, not to put up with either surgical or other prosthetics. It makes me all the more horrified that any young girls and women might be led to think voluntarily disfiguring themselves is the answer to anything.
Anyway, just random thoughts. Great article, and bravas to the writers and to Lisa for inviting this guest post.
Thank you for this woman-strong statement.
Wonderful essay! Brava to Reid and Michelle, two of my FAIR colleagues. I am a FAIR Senior Fellow and Advisory Board member. I am also a trans man who transitioned from "dyke to dude" at age 39 in 2005. I don't deny my femaleness. Nor do I embrace the contemporary ideology put forth by members of the global "trans community" that womanhood and manhood are identities one can feel their way into. I never claim to be male, but I do acknowledge living in the world being perceived as a man. I am grateful to have found a true community in FAIR and generously lend my time and talent for the purpose of spreading FAIR's message of "advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding, and humanity."
I am so grateful for your commitment to FAIR Zander, it's an honor to work alongside you to advance civil liberties and promote a common culture based on fairness, understanding and our humanity.
Thank you so much Zander! It’s an honor to work alongside you, friend. 😊
Wow. What a gorgeous essay. Thank you so much.
"...standing with your own power, which eventually leads to becoming a stronger, more defiant woman."
Beautifully put.
Shannon I read Jon Kay's review of your book and I can't wait to read! Thank you for the kind words.
Awww, thank YOU!
What a beautiful, searing essay.
Thank you two. You are speaking for me (as I am sure Michelle knows)! Very well done.
🙏❤️
Absolutely brilliant essay. Let me count the ways that it counts as such, although I expect I’d run out of fingers and toes long before running out of points to endorse with enthusiastic applause. 🙂 Certainly worth subscribing for another month if not a year.
But I think that a quip or two might reasonably summarize most of my responses on that score, both of which relate to your “strong, steadfast women”. And, speaking of whom, the first comes from Canadian suffragette, Nellie McClung, one of Canada’s “Famous Five”:
“No nation rises higher than its women”
https://isabelmetcalfe.ca/enduring-spirit-of-the-famous-5/
It does our countries not good at all to seriously deprecate or deny the fact that, as Mao Zedong put it, women hold up half the sky. Even though philosopher Kathleen Stock makes a credible case that far too many communists, feminists, and women put far more weight on that phrase than is really justified – half the sky isn’t all of it:
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
But the second quip, underwriting the same “strong steadfast women” phrase, comes from either Will Rogers or Lenny Bruce:
"I never met a dyke I didn't like."
Hard not to like a woman who endorses and manifests what is arguably the best in a man – an unqualified commitment to intellectual honesty: “strong, steadfast women”, indeed. Particularly those who buck the trend, who champion the more or less credible view that “normal is just a setting on your dryer” – even if that setting often has a great deal of utility.
However, something of a fly or two in that ointment – despite its undoubted ability to provide some degree of “salvation”, so to speak – turns on your comments about “linguistic chess” and “female-to-male transitions”. A rather depressing aspect of the “debate” over transgenderism and “transitioning” is a veritable dearth of any of that “intellectual honesty” when it comes to rational definitions for the sexes. Too many – including too many so-called philosophers and biologists – are all too quick to define them as amorphous and loosey-goosey spectra or, gawd help us all, merely as matters of “social construction”.
For an example of the former, there’s transwoman Riley Dennis who seems to “think” that membership in the “female” category is only a matter of “best 3 out of 5” of the traits that are typical of adult human females (AKA, “women”), and who thereby “thinks” that her ersatz neo-vagina and bewbs qualifies “her” as both a female and a lesbian:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Riley_Dennis#On_biological_sex
But the fact of the matter is that – at least by the standard biological definitions endorsed by several reputable biological journals (Theoretical Biology, & Molecular Human Reproduction), and by Oxford Dictionaries – to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
And from that perspective – the more rational and scientifically justified one – transmen, in particular and at least for those over 18, are certainly entitled to repudiate any claims to being members of – at least – the female category, any of their claims to actually having changed sex should be deprecated if not anathematized in no uncertain terms. We are not doing the transgendered any favours at all – nor to the causes of biology and society in general – by pandering to the pathological delusion that humans can actually change sex. As paraphrased by Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg describing the views of transwoman “Helen Highwater”:
“Yet [Highwater] has come to reject the idea that she is truly female or that she ever will be. Though ‘trans women are women’ has become a trans rights rallying cry, Highwater writes, it primes trans women for failure, disappointment, and cognitive dissonance. She calls it a ‘vicious lie.’ ....”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/12/gender-critical-trans-women-the-apostates-of-the-trans-rights-movement.html
http://genderapostates.com/trans-women-are-women-is-a-lie/
Not sure that society should want to be any part of such “lies”. Good intentions and all that.
So while I have a great deal of sympathy for much of your argument, there is something of “fatal flaw” in it – and in much of feminism itself – in the tendency to make “female” and “woman” into “immutable identities” based on some “mythic essence”. Neither of those terms should be seen as describing any sort of a borg – “I am Woman! Hear me roar!”. (Rah, rah 🙄). For one thing it seriously detracts from or diminishes any claims of actual women (i.e., adult human females) to being autonomous individuals: we are all more than just something we invest in, at least ideally.
But maybe somewhat more importantly, such views are profoundly unscientific, if not egregiously anti-scientific. For instance, a review of “Professing Feminism” – by (women) Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge – noted that what characterizes most “women studies programs” is a “virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment”:
https://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/07/27/professing-feminism-noh/
Seems to be some degree of urgent necessity to have an intellectually honest discussion on exactly what it means to be male and female; maybe more importantly to decide on what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in those categories. My more recent kick at that kitty in the context of answering that “age-old question” of “What is a woman?”:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
Great essay. Thank you!
Fantastic essay. Thank you for sharing this.
I posted this article on my Facebook page and a good friend and a therapist (she considers herself nonbinary but I have a really hard time thinking of her as anything but a lesbian woman) responded with the following. Just for consideration. We don't agree but she is a truly wonderful person and I hope - over time - to come to some consensus with her.
Her perspective:
I agree we need a more nuanced perspective, but this isn't nuanced or balanced at all.
Anyone genuinely doing this work is not trying to turn tomboys into men. Tomboys aren’t trans. Practitioners know the difference between sexual orientation/sexual preference and gender identity and lots of people struggle with that. If people who were assigned female at birth turn out to be men that’s a lot different from being masculine or having typical male interests.
What happens when tomboys are no longer allowed to exist without the assumption that they have been born into the wrong body or something is inherently wrong with them? Instead of >>looking outwards towards a society that insists that turning ourselves into lifelong medical patients is the solution. We aren’t doing that. Saying that makes it seem like we are. It positions us as though we were.
It's true that there are folks on either side of this divided discussion who say extreme things. She speaks as though both groups were actual groups and had spokespeople for them.
"being told we are doing it wrong; being lesbian is inherently bigoted”
I don’t say things like that—but she positions me as if I do.
There are individuals whose voices get amplified, much like the right and the left have folks who say all sorts of things and people say liberals are this and conservatives are that.
One of the things folks don’t consider is there in no lesbian community anymore. There is a queer community. Because there is a little less homophobia and more openness it has changed the nature of coming out. That won’t change if trans people disappeared. What is true is that youth come out into the queer community not the lesbian community. Lesbians meet on the internet not in bars. Those days are gone.
This is my field. No one is trying to turn butch women or tomboys into trans men. Many of the doctors and therapists are lesbians and gay men. They don’t have an investment in getting rid of LGB folks.
I think many people are just trying to figure out how to be themselves and find space for themselves. When we were younger there wasn't a choice about transness to explore. Now there is and kids need adults to assist them in sorting this out in non triggered sorts of ways. We need to figure out how to make space for everyone to be who they are. We need to stop taking away people's choices-like taking away families rights to access medical care for trans kids.
The articles she cites are are interesting-they are the trans-women-are-men articles despite her talking here about tomboys. And yes its upsetting for those of us who know that trans women are women. That gender exists. And yes, it’s also true when you tell someone they don’t exist or aren’t who they say they are, they will at times act out aggressively. Trans women get tired of being called men—despite their identities, despite how hard they work to be included and seen. Doesn't excuse inappropriate behavior yet people feel provoked and turning the other cheek gets old.
The regret rate, and I am an expert in this—look me up-hell I am in wikipedia under detransition-—is very small. [see below for her article] Smaller than lasik surgery, lower than knee surgery regret, lower than prostate surgery regret—it gets distorted. Adults make medical decisions they regret daily. We don’t stop them from making decisions. Teenagers increasingly get cosmetic surgery and no one is screaming about that and frankly I think perhaps girls getting breast implants is a bigger deal. In 2019 8000 girls 13-18 got breast implants and we know there is breast implant disease -read about Danica Patrick. So what this article is is political across many dimensions. It’s not as simple as tomboys are transitioning to become men because they don’t know about being masculine lesbians. I'd welcome real discussion because this is really complicated and we all get polarized very quickly. It's hard to talk about. How do masculine lesbians reach out and provide support to younger women rather than taking away trans access to health care? How does the queer community heal this division? These are important. FAIR sounds like a reasonable organization but it's actually pretty knee jerk conservative. It's anti affirmative action in a very creepy way.
Her de-transition link in Wikipedia: https://fenwayhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/Detransitioning-and-Retransitioning-graham-1.pdf
I'm writing an article about gender therapists and would love to quote her—please have her reach out to me. It's great she doesn't say things like being gay is bigoted, but it doesn't mean that other young people aren't learning that message. As for her assertion that she's an expert on detransition—if that's true, she knows that we truly have no idea what the rate is because we have no long-term data, especially on young people transitioned since the spike went way up in 2015. A recent, short-term study showed 7%, and some people say it can take about 8-10 years to fully realize it was the wrong choice—or the right choice!
I would prefer to answer privately. I put a friend request on Facebook so I can message you.
Thanks for posting this Robin I would love to speak with her and have this conversation I think this is what’s necessary for the community right now
I asked her; she hasn't answered. In the meantime, I would prefer to answer privately. I put a friend request on Facebook so I can message you.
Hell yeah!